Nutty Jerry's founder continues efforts to make SETX entertaining with new arena

Tim Monzing, Beaumont Enterprise

By Tim Monzingo

Published 9:19 am, Monday, September 23, 2013

With seating for 3,000, Nutty Jerry's Arena is hoped to be open to events sometime in October. The venue is slated to provide rodeos, monster trucks and concerts.
Photo taken September 19, 2013
Guiseppe Barranco/The Enterprise
Photo: Guiseppe Barranco, STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

With seating for 3,000, Nutty Jerry's Arena is hoped to be open to...

With seating for 3,000, Nutty Jerry's Arena is hoped to be open to events sometime in October. The venue is slated to provide rodeos, monster trucks and concerts.
Photo taken September 19, 2013
Guiseppe Barranco/The Enterprise
Photo: Guiseppe Barranco, STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

With seating for 3,000, Nutty Jerry's Arena is hoped to be open to...

A variety of bouncers, basketball hoops, merry-go-round and other activities transform Nutty Jerry's into Elise's Play House. The indoor amusement center opens to the public next Saturday.
Photo: Sarah Moore

A variety of bouncers, basketball hoops, merry-go-round and other...

Aubrey Andrews, 7, and her sister Ainslea Andrews, 5, play on one of the bouncers at Elise's Play House, an indoor amusement center at Nutty Jerry's that opens to the public next Saturday.
Photo: Sarah Moore

Three years ago, Jerry Nelson's frustration with the region's entertainment scene peaked.

The longtime Southeast Texan wanted to change what he saw as a weak presence in the region, marked by a lack of big names, performers who were coming to Texas but not this corner.

While he tried to work with the area's established venues, he said the rules, regulations and red tape stifled those efforts.

So the oil-field supply man decided enough was enough and forsook those places. Nutty Jerry's was born.

Since it opened in 2010, the venue has grown several times. The most recent addition - a football-field sized, 12,000-capacity arena - is set to open in October.

Southeast Texas has the potential to draw more entertainment and revenue-generating events to the bigger venues in the area, namely Nutty Jerry's and Ford Park, but it takes time and money.

Nutty Jerry's arena boasts bleacher seating for 3,000 people and a large general-admission hill, a portable stage and cattle and bullpens for rodeos. The venue will accommodate auto sports like motocross and monster truck shows, big outdoor concerts and tractor pulls.

Construction is expected to wrap up in a week or two.

Nelson said he borrowed his philosophy from 1989's "Field of Dreams": if you build it, they will come.

"Plant the seed and you'll make it grow," Nelson said.

To build it, he said he had to cast off a pervasive mindset that frustrated him all those years ago.

"Here locally, people always seem to come up with a reason why we can't do it," he said. "There's so many naysayers."

It becomes a fight to try and please everyone just to get wheels in motion.

It's that mentality and red tape, he said, that have stalled long-discussed projects, like the idea of a water park to serve the area.

If entertainment is the bread and butter of Nutty Jerry's, it's more like a side dish for the Jefferson County's Ford Park, said John Hughes, that facility's general manager.

Hughes said the facility hosts more than 200 events per year, the vast majority of which aren't public entertainment like concerts but nonetheless drive money into the local economy through hotel and restaurant revenue that comes with event attendees.

"Our business model isn't just entertainment," he said. "We're a mass-use facility."

The bulk of the park's revenue is generated by events like company picnics, banquets and the circus, Hughes said.

In recent years, softball tournaments have boomed at the park, he said.

Hughes, like Nelson, said the potential exists to attract more interest to the area.

Association conferences could be a money-maker for the park, but he said part of the reason they pass up Beaumont is the lack of an on-site hotel.

Over the past five years, conferences have been drawn to facilities with hotels attached to them for convenience's sake. Hughes said it's unlikely large conferences would come to Ford Park, but there's money to be made from small and mid-sized conferences.

A hotel would be a prerequisite.

Any development of the facility - be it a hotel, a water park or something else - requires market research and cost studies beforehand.

Jerry Nelson isn't weighed down by those considerations. Although Nelson is a native Floridian, Southeast Texas is his home and has been for most of his life. That gives him a good perspective on the market without the paperwork.

The amenities added to his venue over its three years have taken time to build and fund, and Nelson said the arena isn't the end of it.